US 127 Yard Sale-2012 Edition; Saturday and Sunday

Photos from the last 2 days of  2012 Boulder Belt Yard Sale in no particular order

The Joys of Farming

I was going to post a bunch of pictures of the farm but have decided that I need to vent instead about various things having to do with my profession-market farming.

First off our season is pretty sucky. The weather has been either too wet or too dry and always too hot and humid so we can get less done in a day than is needed. This means getting weeds under control has been herculean task. Even the crops planted on mulch need to be weeded. Today i pulled about 200 pounds of crab grass and purslain from 2 beds of peppers. Still have another 7 or 8 to go. Eugene has been using the wheel hoe to weed the beds that are not cover with landscape fabric whenever it is dry enough to use a hoe but before the ground resembles concrete. I believe we have 4 days with those conditions in the past 6 weeks but, of course it was very hot and humid on those day with highs in the upper 90's.

Because of the hot humid conditions we have loads of Japanese beetles eating and copulating. I have become Ms Coitus Interruptus as I kill any mating JB's I come across and can get my hands (AKA deadly weapons, as far as the past bugs are concerned). We also are getting hit with various soil born diseases on the tomatoes. I did hit them with grapefruit seed extract a week ago and that really did a number on the various fungii attacking the maters but the rain early this morning made whatever was not destroyed by the GSE bloom abundantly so now there are many yellowing mater plants where yesterday there were 3. By many I mean around 50 to 75. At least most the plants have fruit on them so we should get a lot of maters in another 2 to 4 weeks. And I am not too worried about this as we get this blighty ick that is neither early or late blight but still kills the plants by September problem every year.

On top of that our tillage equipment is broken and Eugene so far cannot figure out what is wrong and the BCS manual is of little help other than the fascinating photos of various parts exploded so you can see the individual parts but absolutely no explanation of what they are, do or where they should actually go in order to make the machine run. I would say this is the polar opposite of a Chilton's Manual. Maybe this is Italy's revenge for losing WWII and any other complaints they have towards us Merkins.

So for the past month we have been using hand tools to keep beds weeded and prepped for planting. At some point Eugene will give up on trying to figure the problem(s) out himself and push the 450 pound 2 wheeled tractor up a hill and into the van and take it to the Arcanum Hardware store where they have a guy who works on BCS equipment. Hopefully that person can figure out what is wrong and order the parts needed and than we will wait 2 to 4 weeks for the parts to come in as they come from Italy and it always takes a while for them to send the parts to us.

Betty has been good for a dog her age which means she has not destroyed all the market garden but she is trying. She did in a lot of green beans killing a young raccoon who was doing a huge number on the Latham raspberries the past week. Since the bean patch was the first one of the year and old and we have 5 others just about ready to bear fruit this was not a big deal. And we would rather lose 20% of a green bean bed than 50% of our raspberry canes (and God knows what else) to a coon. But than again the raspberries have been a bit of a disappointment. various things are killing them and we have lost 100' this year to borers, fusarium and perhaps pythium. so that means the raspberry harvest is way down. but it turns out that is not such a bad thing because our sales, despite having the only raspberries in the region and dropping our price 33% are way down this over the past 5 to to years. I guess people just don't want poison free red raspberries anymore, I don't know. But I do know that in the past, the raspberries were one of our main revenue generators for this time of year.

And that bring me to our marketing. our sales are down across the board. we don't get a lot of people coming into the store and more and more the ones who do come buy nothing because the think the prices are too high (and generally are pretty damned rude about it too). If we lower them any more we will be back to making around $2 a hour and will no longer be able to pay the mortgage, gas and electric and will have to get rid of the farm. the CSA is beginning to get more members and it seems that most seem interested in doing it again next year but we have less than half the members we had at this point last year. I really think the fake CSA-companies that buy and resell food, claim to offer local food but rarely do and even when they do it is less than 15% of what the sell-have taken a large share of our market. And the sad thing is I personally know people who have joined them and have told me proudly the are CSA members. Sorry folks, but if you buy food from one of those fake CSA you are not participating in a CSA that grows all of it's food, and the members share in the risk and bounty of their CSA farm. It distresses me that people who should "get it" do not. Some of the people I know who use these services work closely with farmers markets and local farmers. Just makes me shake my head. Such disconnect. But I guess price and convenience always trumps the real deal of picking up food freshly harvested at the farm and getting to talk to the people that grow the food you will eat.

The positive thing about this season's CSA is our members. I really like all of them and I really enjoy puytting together the shares and news letter for them every week. Oh and despite issues with weather and the garden we have had some really great shares this year (pretty much all of them)

The farmers market in Oxford is taking a turn for the worst. Overall our sales are way down despite the fact we were able to harvest 1/2 of our asparagus full and the other half 30% this year meaning we had about double the asparagus we have ever had in the past. We also grew and sold a lot of lettuce which made May a good month for us. But June and July have not been so good. I think there are several factors going on. 1) there are 2x or 3x as many farmers and no increase in customers walking through the market, because 2) they banned dogs from market which has lead to a marked decrease in customer traffic the past 3 weeks (a lot of people were royally pissed off over this decision by the market board which I agreed with at the time, and I believe are boycotting the market.) 3) The market is getting too crafty/artsy and the farmers are losing importance. It seem that the Oxford Farmers Market Uptown is more of a social event than a place to buy locally raised foods. 4)There are more and more people selling prepared foods at market which is great for the customers but I do not believe many, if any, are sourcing the ingredients locally from us growers so that too is cutting into our bottom line. And finally, 5) we seem to be in an economic depression and people percieve farmers markets as places where food is very expensive. And This is true for some things (usually things you cannot get normally at Kroger's or Wal-Mart, like 45 different kinds of heirloom tomatoes, or other heirloom fruits and veggies that cannot take the handling to be sold at any chain. But for most things the prices are the same or even less for food that is a whole lot better.

These are just some of the joys of farming.

Asparagus Sighting

This morning while doing the morning walk about the garden I found an asparagus spear poking above the mulch. Looking around I found a couple more spears above the mulch and many more just emerging from the soil. We don't have enough for tonight's dinner but I will bet by this time next week we should have enough to sell to justify opening the store for the 2010 season. And it looks like the Farm Share members will get asparagus in their very first share, which was totally unexpected. This is several weeks early. This also means we will have asparagus for the last winter farmers market (or is it the first spring farmers market?) April 24th in beautiful Uptown Oxford, OH

Summer Summary

Fall is here which means the summer of 2009 is officially history. It was a really good summer growing and marketing season for us. the weather was cool and for the most part dry. but when we did get rain it was generally a lot and at just the right time. Still we are down over 4" on rain for the year but perhaps this fall will be wetter than normal and we will make it up.

We grew the best melons ever (and Eugene is an excellent melon grower). Maybe 2% of them were not absolutely excellent. we had several customers (and these are people who's opinions about such things I respect) tell us that our water melons were the best they have ever eaten.

The alliums out did themselves again this year, meaning they are better this year than last and last year they were incredible. Sublime garlic, gigantic leeks (and so far, all we have harvested are the small fall leeks, the winter leeks which should be 2x to 3x larger won't be ready for another month or so), beautiful onions and wonderful scallions.

The tomatoes, despite the plants succumbing to some sort of local blight (not late blight but rather something we contend with every year) fairly early, still produced a lot of huge fruits. Or at least most of them did. We did have some failures such as Black Krim which gave us few very cat faced fruits. I believe we got about 4 usable maters from 15 plants. I do not believe we will grow these again. The Paul Robeson did not do well for us but when the plants did produce typical fruit it produced some gorgeous tomatoes. I saved seed early on and this will get a second chance. The Green Zebra was something else-I believe a small red saladette type mater, something we have far too many of already. Baker Creek messed up on that and as this was about the 7th time they have messed up with us, we will not be ordering from them in 2010. I do like their philosophy but they will have to do far better with selling us correct seed, good seed and getting orders to us in a timely fashion. There are several other seed houses that do heirlooms that give us better service such as Seed Savers Exchange.

Ah enough ranting, back to maters. The great White tomato, while a bad seller, was a great producer of beautiful ivory white fruits with a good acid bite. they came on early and produced longer than just about anything else except early girls which, while early and prolific were a bit of a disappointment this year. The early girls were not as big as last year and found the flavor lacking. fortunately we had GL-18 (AKA Glick's Pride) as our mainstay red mater and they far exceeded our expectations. they were far bigger than they have been before. The shape was about perfect and they rarely cracked and had zero cat facing. It would have been nice if they could have held on a week or two longer but they got us through most of September and we had big red maters when no one else did at the farmers market, cha-ching!. The other reds we grew-the canners did really well for us but I don't think as well as last year (or was it two years ago?). We grew Amish paste and Opalka again. The Amish paste out produced the Opalka about 4:1. We grew enough of these to make and can ourselves plenty of tomato sauce, ratatouille and salsa plus we sold about 300 pounds to others so they could put up tomatoes.

The cherry tomatoes were only so so (which is actually a good thing since when they do really well that means someone has to spend several hours daily picking them and than we have to figure out what to do with the excess). We have decided never to grow green grape again since it does not sell. This means it will produce hundreds of volunteers all over the farm in the future. It is hard to get people to try the green maters. Though it seems when I can get someone to try a green grape they get hooked quickly. they are a very nice mater but for most it is hard to get past the color. The yellow pear barely produced and a lot of them were green again this year. I think it is time to get new seed. the Sun sugar did well for about 3 weeks than quit producing much and the plants now look like hell. This is good as everyone at the farmers market(s) grew this kind this year so the market was flooded and sales were way down. I think next year we will cut back a lot on the cherry tomatoes. We do not need all that many for the farm share-maybe 20 to 30 plants and it seems they have become passe at market. that will free up beds for something else next year.

Unlike last year, we have a lot of ripe peppers. Last year the peppers were very late and we got a killing frost before they got ripe. It did not help that on Sept 14th 2008 we had hurricane force winds for about 6 hours that knocked down all the pepper plants. This year things are completely different. We have a lot of huge bell peppers and they are getting ripe well before it gets cold. I have also learned to take them off the plants when they show color and they ripen up just fine indoors away from pests and diseases that tend to ruin about 50% of the ripe peppers (which is why red, yellow and orange (ripe) peppers cost twice as much as green peppers).

the raspberries out did themselves again this season. The Lathams, our early summer raspberry, was spectacular again. Heavy production and excellent quality. My only complaint was we did a piss poor job of pruning in the early spring which made parts of the raspberry patch almost impossible to harvest. Next year I am cutting back a lot more than Eugene will deem necessary (he has a problem with thinning out plants and wants to leave a lot more than should be left). The Heritage raspberries, which we mow down in early spring, had quite good production and the flavor has been sublime, far better than the Lathams (which, as I said were excellent). Eugene has this crazy notion that we should let the heritage grow and produce in spring. I have this crazy idea that he can do all the harvesting as well as tilling, seeding, transplanting and other spring chores if this happens. You see we do not need a second kind of spring raspberry when the Lathams are pumping out over 30 gallons of fruit. As it is we do not sell all the Lathams produce (we come close but in order to get rid of them we have to sell in bulk and drop the price 33%). We do sell pretty much 100% of the Late summer berries and if we allow the Heritage to have 2 crops we will lessen the fall yield by about 60% and not have enough for the FSI, store and farmers market in August and September. In other words, Eugene's idea of more spring/summer berries is a bad one on many levels.

The strawberries have not been the best. I don't think we have them in the best place and they need to be replaced this fall with new day neutral berries. the yields have been down and disease problems up. We did get a very nice crop of April may berries because we put a hoop house over them. Granted, the hoop house got nailed twice in the winter-once by heavy wet snow and than a month later by high winds. But neither incident seemed to have any effect on the berry production. it is ironic that the first year the berries have been less than great we do a farm tour and in November a workshop on sustainable berry production. I will say the farm tour attendees did not seem to care what kind of shape the berries were in. Next season we should have a new crop of berries in a new and better spot and hopefully we will be swimming strawberries all spring summer and fall next year.

The greens have been around all season. In spring we had lots of lettuce, spring mix, arugula, kale and various Asian greens. Summer we lost the lettuce-we did try to grow some several times because it was cool most of the summer but every time we started lettuce we would get 5 to 8 days of heat and humidity, always a week or two after germination and that would cause the baby lettuce to get bitter and bolt to seed. now that it is autumn we have several beds of nice lettuce growing as well as volunteers coming up around the market garden. the same thing happened with spring mix. After late June it got impossible to grow it though we did try. We did get several harvests of arugula for our efforts through the summer but nothing else from the spring mix beds. Kale and chard were the summer mainstay greens, they always are.

Broccoli did badly for us but we did get some decent cabbages. I dunno why we have such problems with broccoli, perhaps we should quit growing it. Spring radishes were hit and miss and the early red meat radishes were a complete failure. But we do have a 1/2 bed of them now that are very nice. We got really nice early rutabagas as well as red turnips. the fall red turnips are ready to harvest and store for winter, though it will be early next week before that will happen.

Finally, the Farm Share Initiative has been a great thing for us. It allowed us drop a farmers market and make more money while being allowed to stay home and get more work done. Definitely a win, win for us and the fact very few people seemed to notice there is no longer a Tuesday evening market in Oxford (maybe 10 people have asked about this this summer) tells me that we would have made less money this year than last at that market. So it is good that we are doing the FSI.

I think I will change a few things on how the FSI is run next season. This season I allowed members to sign up for the entire season but pay monthly. That will stop as it is not fair to the members that ponied up the cash for the entire season upfront. And the members who did this have all dropped out for the last month, not good. They also got a few extra weeks as I was treating them like the paid in full members as I expected them to go through the entire season. I think the monthly farm tour/pot luck will go as well since we only were able to hold two this year mostly because of a lack of interest on the part of most of the members. I think a once a year farm tour/pot luck will suffice. I am having a hard time getting it through to the members that farm visits are a very important aspect of the farm share/CSA experience. This is how one connects to their farm and without farm visits one might as well buy their food from the farmers market. I also think it is time to drop the month to month deal. This has the potential of getting very confusing which will lead to mistakes -especially when the FSI grows to more than 30 members. It will be replaced by what I used call "Share Cycles" where I break the season down into 2 or 3 month increments for those who cannot do an entire season for whatever reason.

Well, that's the summery of our summer

Raspberry World

The raspberry season has begun. As usual it starts small and slowly builds until my life is consumed by red raspberries for about 6 weeks.

Today I picked 1/2 pint, tomorrow it will likely be 3x that amount and by this time next week I should be harvesting about 10 to 20 1/2 pints a day. By the end of the month it will be about 50 1/2 pints a day. Maybe more as the plants are a lot bigger this year and are loaded with berries that undoubtedly will get big because now that spring is just about over we have lots and lots of rain, which the berries need in abundance to be big and sweet.



I took this photo in early May. At this point the canes were about the same height as they were last year. Since than they have put on an addition 2 feet of height and back towards the middle (where they already had started to lean into the aisle way) the canes have pretty much collapsed for about 25 feet. I have tied them up with bailing twine but it is still a mess back in there and will be a bitch to harvest but by no means impossible. And hey, they are thornless canes so no biggie.

I have been amazed at the variety of pollenators on these plants. Every kind of bee we have around here (at least 10 species) has been busy collecting nectar and pollen along with various moths and butterflies. I have noticed that the squash vine borers love the raspberry flowers and seem to get drunk on the nectar making them very easy to grab and squish. Normally it is hard to catch these moths as they are very fast and agile. This is something I really love about harvesting raspberries is watching all the activity in the canes. Spiders, daddy Long legs, flies, plant pests, preying mantids, wheel bugs, bees, moths, butterflies all either live there or come by to visit. I find evidence of great drama that has happened in the raspberry world. Husks of bug and spider bodies, a Daddy long legs sucking a plant bug dry (okay on that one I got to witness the drama), wheel bugs lying in wait for their next victim. For a bug nerd such as myself it is a fascinating world.

We have a small amount available at the store today and certainly will have a nice amount for the Saturday farmers Market in Oxford. The farm share members will start to see the raspberries in their shares starting next week.

What doesn't sell will either be made into raspberry jam (which will be available at the store eventually) or frozen for later use-mainly frozen rum drinks and yogurt smoothies.

Store's Open for 2009

Actually it's tomorrow that I am opening the store for the 2009 season. Saturday and Sunday noon to 7pm. Regular hours will be Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday noon to 5pm.

Check our website Boulderbeltfarm.com for more information

The asparagus is coming in and I have also begun picking strawberries, though I don't know if there will be enough to sell by Saturday. The hot, sunny weather today (it's 82F) should cause a lot to ripen in a hurry. Will have to play that one by ear. But asparagus we got, and it is really, really good

If I get out tomorrow morning before the winds pick up we should also have spinach, heirloom lettuce and maybe some scallions and leeks.

Today I am cleaning the store. So far I have washed the sales fridge and all the racks that go in it. Man, that refrigerator was dirty. the bottom was full of goo, dead flies, veggie bits and the walls had lots of black mold (which the GSE I used in the wash water ought to stop). The racks were also nasty and much harder to clean than the fridge box. But now everything is sparkly clean and more important sanitary. I am grateful to my restaurant exp for getting the opportunity to clean out a lot of nasty reach in fridges and walk-in coolers. Makes this job seem easy.

Next I am going to wash down the shelves and windows and do some light vaccuuming. After that put up some posters of various heirloom roots and veggies and than harvest more asparagus for tomorrow.

Boulder Belt in Winter

Winter is here-it is cold, snowy and most everything that is not we covered is dead. This means things have slowed way down for us (yay!) It is nice to be able to kick back for a month or so before the 80 hour a week grinds starts again.

People want to know what we farmers do in the off season. For us, we spend a lot of November cleaning up stuff like the store, the garden beds, popcorn, catnip, onions. Crunching numbers on the various produce items we grow so we have an idea as to what is selling and what is not selling so we know what seeds to plant for the coming season. Eugene does not do much on the computer so it is me who keeps the blog and website updated and that can be time consuming, especially this year since it looks like Boulder Belt is back in the CSA biz and that means at some point I need to design an informative CSA page for the Boulder Belt Website.

December is too often spent removing snow from hoop houses and driveways. It is also the time we put in our main seed order with Johnny's Selected Seeds (our favorite seed house). In the past we have waited until after Christmas to put in our order but there are rumors that there will be seed shortages this year so I believe I will get at least part of the order in in early Dec. or even late November. December is usually the Month that we start the onions and leeks indoors, though this year I believe the onions will be started today or tomorrow (that would be mid November). The reason for moving up the date is due to the fact we have quite a few Copra onion seeds left over from last year and We decided that those should be planted to see if they have strong germination. If they do than we do not need to order more seed. If they do not than we will know by Dec 1st if the seeds are working or not and can get an order into Johnny's early enough to avoid the dreaded back order that can set one back several months.

If December, January and February are mild (which is the NOAA prediction for us this winter, but I will believe that when I see it) than the crops in the hoop houses will continue to produce pretty much all winter and someone has to go and harvest and package the crops periodically (weekly-as growth slows way down in the winter even if it is relatively warm and sunny). We than sell the greens, leeks, etc., at the Oxford Monthly Winter market and this year the CSA gets their share as well. We also sell through the store via email appointment and occasionally to a restaurant or Miami University.

If the winter months are cold with a lot of precip, than most things quit growing until Late Feb and cannot be harvested, the exception to this are the leeks and scallions. Than we sit around twiddling our thumbs waiting on the greens to come back to life. Okay, we don't spend much time thumb twiddling (but we do start craving greens in a big way and are delighted when things are harvestable again). If it is a snowy winter than we are spending lots of time removing snow from the hoop houses, otherwise they get flattened and are unuseable and have to be repaired or replaced. this has happened a couple of times to us and incredibly the crops under all the snow and plastic are generally unharmed and producing very well when we finally get to them

What we are doing by Feb is starting seriously seeds indoors. This starts out slowly with around 15 pots of onions and leeks planted in Dec/Jan. Those are followed by the brassicas-kale, broccoli, cabbages, etc., and lettuces in mid to late Feb. Those crops are repeatedly seeded indoors through April/May so we have a continual harvest April through June/July. By late March we are also starting early tomatoes, peppers, zucchini and melons to be planted in mid April in hoop houses. In April the main crops of tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, celery, celeriac, parsley, flowers, etc., are started which fills up the grow room along with cold frames and hoop houses with thousands of seedlings.

Once the seeds are started we are tied to the farm. The seeds need daily tending-watering, fertilizing, pricking (this means to re pot into a larger container), making soil (we make our own soil mix for seed starting as we have a hard time finding soiless mixes that don't contain petroleum products or chemical fertilizers. Add to that, we start seeds in soil blocks and we make our own soil blocks so the soiless mix has to be just so for it to work for us. Making our own soil blocks means we use very little plastic when starting our seedlings. It probably saves us around a thousand bucks a year as well (of course it increases our work load by at least 100 hours as we have to make a lot of soil and a lot of soil blocks.)

So you can see that we small sustainable farmers really don't have much down time at all. Some day, perhaps, we will quit this idea of winter growing and marketing and will shut the farm down in November and go to the Caribbean for 4 months.

Cleaning Red Turnips

People often comment on how beautiful our produce is but it did not start out that way. What you see at the farmers market or on the sales floor of our store is the result of many hours of wet muddy work on my part (Eugene does some post harvest/cleaning of produce but I do most of it-like 85%). The produce generally comes in muddy.

Some things, like these red turnips are dirtier than other things like tomatoes or peppers which hardly ever need washing


I had 6 crates of red turnips to clean and what you see here is a crate of turnips yet to be cleaned up, a compost crate over stuffed with turnip greens that were not usable and next to the pears in the corner turnip greens that were sellable being put aside to be cleaned after the turnips got washed.


Some turnips that have had their greens removed and have been tossed in the wash water.
The wash tub late had about 10x as many roots as are shown in this photo.



The finished product. A crate of beautiful, clean turnips ready to go in the fridge for storage so we can sell them for several weeks. They will store beautifully in the fridge for about 3 to 4 months but we will likely sell them out well before that.

39 items

I was just updating the Boulder Belt website's farm store page and noticed we are offering 39 different items at the store and farmers markets. Not bad considering we are winding down for the year

New Windows are In Place

windows today. The plan was to get about 1/2 of the windows installed but as I write this they are finishing up installing all but one window (one was damaged and was sent back to Our buddy Mark showed up late last night in order to help Eugene put in our new pellaPella when we picked them up at Lowe's. It will be here in a week or two), pretty slick.

While they took out the old nasty very untight old windows, I spent my time cleaning up some of the many onions we have curing, cleaning dried dill that has been sitting in a dehydrator for a couple of weeks waiting for me to do something with it (dill is a very tedious herb to clean so I avoided doing so for a long time). Now I have around 1/2 pound of dried dill in a freezer. I doubt I will dry any more of it, I have enough to sell and use for the rest of the year.

Waited on a few customers while I was cleaning the dill. Sold some tomatoes, strawberries and green beans.

Than I decided it was time to process tomatoes so I got the Victorio out and put it together, brought in a crate of tomatoes and got to work putting them through the Victorio. After 15 minutes the thing jammed and than fell off the table and tomatoes, tomato juice and tomato waste flew everywhere. I angerly tossed the contraption into the sink (avoiding the thawing turkey) and grabbed a mop to mop up all the tomato crap all over the floor, chair, crate (that was still half full of maters) and table. Took the crate of tomatoes outside and hosed everything down (which meant I found a rotting tomato) and got the crate and fruit really clean.

Now the house is a mess. The boys used some sort of expandable foam that looks a whole lot like marshmallow fluff and that has gotten all over the place (mostly where it needs to be). I have not gone upstairs yet (I think I will avoid doing so until bed time as I heard a lot of crashing up there) but I assume it is messier than the kitchen.

The good news is everything is in place and now all that needs to be done is the finish work, which will start next weekend. Oh yeah and one window is MIA and still needs to be done start to finish.

I gotta say the new windows are marvelous and already are keeping the heat from pouring in the house (and I am certain will keep the cold out of the house). They have an R value of 25 which is far better than the walls that surround them. I don't know what the R value of the old windows was but probably well below an R15. We will be using a lot less energy this winter to keep the house warm and that is a good thing on a lot of levels. For one, it is a very green thing to do and to me, that alone, is worth the $2100 or so this project has cost so far. I am sure by the end of this winter the windows will be close to paying for themselves, certainly over the next 5 years they will in fuel savings alone.

World's Longest Yard Sale; Day 1

I did not take my camera to the yard sale today so I have no images except in my mind. But despite my lack of camera the first day of the 2008 127 yard sale was a huge success. we were missing several vendors who said they would be here. All I can say is their loss, as everyone who did show up did great business. the place was hopping from 8am until 7pm when I had my last customer, a woman from Richmond, In who wanted some arugula and corn. There were a lot of people coming through who were attempting to do the entire 800+ miles. tomorrow we will not see that because if you don't get started in either Alabama or Ohio on Thursday you will not be able to do the entire route.

The weather was just about perfect-low humidity, temps in the low 80's and dry (though it was raining just to the north of us by 5pm). lats year the temps were in the 90's and the humidity was high so by 9am everyone was dripping.

It was great having a real food vendor. It's even better that it is someone I know fairly well now and makes food I really, really like. There were a lot of people who got to our portion of the sale just after they had already eaten lunch (and probably fast food lunch at that) who got a whiff of the BBQ and said they wish they had known there was going to be food here. There were far more people who had a brisket or pulled pork sandwich and went away happy campers and there were a few who had just eaten and ordered something anyway because it smelled so darned good.

Jules sold this wooden tug boat rope guide she had been toting around for several years. Last night she vowed to toss it on a fire this weekend if it did not sell by Saturday Evening. By around noon it was being carted away by a yard saler. This happened, ironically while I was talking to a couple from Louisiana and the husband revealed he was a Mississippi tug boat captain 30 years ago just as I saw the rope guide being put in a SUV. Karmic, or something.

Now I am bone tired and need to make something for dinner and get ready for tomorrow-I ran out of fliers for the farm and have printed out another 30 and now they need to be folded and I am sure there are other things that need attention like the dogs and cats.

I vow to take my camera out to the sale tomorrow and get some nice shots to post tomorrow night.

A Short Tuesday

Yesterday, being Tuesday meant we had a farmers market in Oxford. So we got up early and did a lot of harvesting, washing, bagging and bunching in order to get various produce items ready for market before 2:30pm.

Around noon a woman stopped looking for berries. She wanted to know if we were open and I said no. She wanted to look around the store to see what we had to offer and I told because we are not open on Tuesdays I did not have the sales floor set up. that most things were stored away in the back but that I could still sell her what ever it was she wanted. She wanted strawberries and red raspberries so I grabbed her a box of each and she went on her way. I continued getting things ready for market.

It was good she stopped and bought some berries as we have a lot of raspberries and they are showing no sing of letting up. every day dither Eugene of I go our to pick the berries and we say "well tomorrow there should be less. It looks like they are beginning to slack off." And the next day we go out and pick more than the day before. We were thinking when the Japanese beetles exploded, which they have done in the past 5 days, they would damage most of the berries and we would have less to pick. That has not happened yet. I am not complaining, the raspberries have been great sellers and will likely allow us to either buy another vehicle (we only have one-the market van and that does not get the best gas mileage in the world) or put a new roof on the barn so it quits leaking when it rains. maybe both if they keep on keeping on.

Any way, at 2:45 I go up to the garden to see what Eugen was doing and to tell him it is time to wrap up his project so we can go to Oxford for the farmers market. he's picking raspberries and still has 6 empty 1/2 pint tills (what we call the berry boxes). So I pick up a till and start to fill it with the biggest and best tasting raspberries we have so far harvested from these bushes (it seems every day they get better). 20 minutes later we have the the 6 tills filled and go back to the store to wrap them and put them in the fridge. Than I quickly load the coolers and crates in the van. I run into the house to change and notice it is after 3pm-we are officially running late. I yell at Eugene to stop whatever he is doing (piddling around) and come in the house and get some dry and clean cloths on (it was hot and very humid so we were both sopping wet after picking berries). We get dressed and in the van and are about ready to leave when Pekar stops by to tell us about his upcoming Birthday party this Saturday. This is a party I have gone to for at least 15 years but over the years it has drawn in more and more people I do not know or want to hang with (a lot of neo-cons and cops). Add to that that our buddy Chuck is having one of his annual parties the same night and he has a pool and a lot of old hippy liberals, most of whom I have known for a couple of decades. So we had to tell Pekar we probably would not make his party. Chuck's party is a lot more fun, better food, better conversation and a pool.

So we got rid of Pekar and got on the road and got to Oxford right around 4pm (so not late). The weather was becoming changeable and the winds were gusting up to 30mph. this was making it hard for Kim Traylor to keep her jewelry from falling to the ground and the Ison's had their shelter damaged when the wind caught it and moved it several feet. We got set up and started selling produce to the public all the while keeping an eye to the sky. Around 6pm, just as our business was really picking up, the sky was looking pretty black and officer Butts, one of the OPD, came by and suggested strongly we close up the market as there was a severe storm coming towards Oxford and was about 15 miles west of us. So everyone packed up their stuff and we all traded food. We got some Lamb and an orange bread and gave out boxes of raspberries in exchange. I dunno where the other went after the short market but we went to the Smokin' Ox for a draft beer and light conversation. while we were there it started raining and the winds came up a bit and it even thundered a little but looking at a weather radar we saw the big storm missed Oxford. it went about 1/2 mile to the south. So it turned out we did not need to tear down early. We justified doing so by telling ourselves it was just rainy enough to keep everyone indoors and we would not have sold anything. After the beer we left the restaurant and headed home and had an early night.

Busy, Busy, Busy

We have been very, very busy the past few weeks. Eugene has been ripping out old plants , tilling the ground where they were and replanting with new crops. Monday he removed several beds of peas and pea fencing, tilled and planted potatoes. I have been harvesting and selling raspberries. I am a slave to the raspberries at the moment. I spend around 3 to 5 hours daily harvesting the things. It's an interesting job as there is a wonderful ecosystem living in the berry bushes. I see many kinds of spiders, Daddy long legs (harvestmen), wheel bugs, pirate bugs all preying on the stink bugs, aphids, worms laid by some sort of moth, japanese Beetles etc.. The birds have surprisingly, not done a lot of damage to the raspberries, maybe because there are so many that even if they are eating a lot I am not noticing it.

Along with harvesting raspberries we are also picking kale (except the dinosaur kale that has pretty much died-We think because it has been too wet), broccoli, peas (which take almost as much time to pick as the raspberries), turnips, rutabagas, basil, parsley, cucumbers, zucchini, onions, garlic, scallions and a few strawberries.

On top of all that the rain has lead to many weeds so someone has to hoe and pull weeds. Eugene has been doing the bulk of that work though I pull weeds when I harvest out of beds that have a weed problem.

And if all that work is not enough we have to market the crops. We have markets 6 days a week right now though I am thinking of closing the store either on Wednesday or Sunday (even though we do good sales on both of those days) just so we have an extra day to get stuff done in the garden and also off the farm as we have errands to run just like everyone else and lately it has been difficult to schedule trips to the bank, grocery, post office (they don't deliver out here). the good news is even though we are insanely busy business has been excellent so at least we are getting minimum wage for our efforts (in the past were doing well to make $2.50 an hour-farming has not been a well paying profession since the 1920's)

I will be happy when work slacks off a bit. if you don't see any new entries to this blog for a while this is why.

Quiet Sunday

I'm sitting here inside out of the hot sun waiting for someone to stop at the store and buy something. Sundays seem to be the slow day of the week for the store. That's okay after Thursday, Friday and Saturday I can use a slow day.

Yesterday it rained most of the day (had a stormy farmers market which was interesting, to say the least) so the ground is wet making it easy to do weed pulling and that is what we did this morning until a bit after 11am. Sat in the grass in an aisle way and pulled lots of different weeds from in between scallions. Got bout 2/3 of the bed done before I realized it was probably after 11 am and the store needed to be opened. So now that it is 90˚F/32˚c I won't be going back out until after 6pm. Eugene, on the other hand, seems to like working in high heat

While I was weeding the scallions I was thinking this is a part of the of what we do that is kind of similar to a home garden. than I thought "but if this were a home garden I would have been done weeding the scallions a while ago because no home gardener in their right mind would have 3 50' (15m) rows of scallions for any reason". So, once again I came to the conclusion that what we small market farmers/gardeners do is not anything like what a home gardener does, even a gardener with a huge home garden.

If I go back to having a non-commercial garden it will be anally neat and clean, unlike what we have now which, because of all the rain and now heat, is becoming a weed patch. Eugene has been keeping up decently with hoeing/tilling but lately we have had a lot of rain and a lot of heat so all the plants are growing fast and it is too wet to hoe so the only thing to do is hand weed which is around 20x slower than using the wheel hoe. Plus we have found over the years having some weeds in the garden beds is good for things-they add different nutrients and do different things to the soil. You just can't let them get out of control and take over but you also don't need to worry about getting every last one, either. This idea of the perfectly weedless garden has been brought to us by the chemical companies who sell herbicides. The more we believe is the virtue of the weedless garden the more herbicide they sell.

Did a load of laundry and Eugene vacuumed the dog hair off of the carpets (the dogs seem to be perpetually shedding). Yes, I realize it is still shedding season but these guys seem to have copious amounts of fur coming off even with brushing. Granted, Danny is the main culprit with his chow/border collie long coat of wispy blond hair and a dislike for being brushed or trimmed. this makes it hard to brush his entire body as he either walks away or if I tie him up he than sits/lies on his side or in some other way contorts his body so I cannot brush him. I guess I need to find the horse ear clippers, drag the dog into the barn and shave his furry ass and be done with it. Personally, I would rather body clip a horse than shave this dog, even though Danny is under 40 pounds and has virtually no teeth.

After morning cleaning had a breakfast of eggs and bacon (all from local sources-the bacon I bartered for spinach at market yesterday. Also bartered spinach for fresh pasta, foccacia, lamb chops, lamb steak and whole wheat bread. It was stormy and slow at market so everyone had stuff to trade. I love days like that). Than went and started in on the scallions which brings us back to now, me sitting here blogging and waiting.

Refrigeration and the Eco-Farm

The farm store open for business on a rainy day in May

One of the cool things about this farm (and there many) is it had a store building already built when we got here. The store is a work in progress for us. We started with a 20' x 40' open space and Eugene built a wall so we have a retail space and a work space. After that was done the building was rewired as we found when we plugged in the vacuum cleaner the lights would get very bright . A bad thing, especially if you are intending to plug in the big fridge (or two) and run it 24/7/365. So, last spring we got help from our buddy Wyatt and got the electrical system working a lot better (and likely up to code, which it most certainly was not). So the big fridge that had been living in the barn the first 9 months we were here could now live and run in the store. This year was the year of the eBay fridges. As regular readers know, we bought two glass front fridges on eBay for $500 and had an adventure hauling them back home. Found out in late April one works and one does not and it would take about $2000 to fix the non working one (we can get an almost new one for under $2 grand so not worth dealing with). But one does work and we have it in the store keeping the produce cold and fresh. The fridge has made life a lot easier on many levels and when it breaks down we will buy a new one because I can see we cannot function well without such technology.

The one running glass front fridge full of good things to eat

To any budding eco-farmers, investing in refrigeration will pay off well in the not so long run. The quality and longevity of your produce will increase dramatically (our lettuce will last 3 to 4 weeks if it has been properly chilled ASAP after harvest. If it has not been properly cooled it will last a week at best). We have had storage refrigeration for the past 10 year and having such meant we did not have to harvest everything within 20 hours of a market which can kill a person. I really hated those 20 hour days followed by a 14 hour day that we had to pull to get ready for the Saturday morning market. And it was made worse because the quality of our produce degraded quickly, especially in hot weather. That meant we were composting, often half of what we harvested. It gets depressing to toss out half of your hard work just about every week. Refrigeration stopped that, cut our work hours and upped the quality of everything that needs to be cold.

Locavores, when you see wilted food at the farmers market what you are generally seeing is a farm that is not using refrigeration and also a farmer who has not yet learned good post harvest practises. It takes a while to learn everything there is know about growing food for market. Most new growers get better and better each year and as they get better improve their operations as they can afford to. But some farmers believe they do not need refrigeration and that is their choice. They just don't know how much refrigeration would improve their farm, life and produce quality.

A Farmers or Crafters Market?

Eugene finishing setting up the market stand. We brought a lot of lettuce, that's what's in most of the bags.

Yesterday was farmers market day in Oxford (as well as Miami U's graduation-congrats to any graduates who are reading this). It was a beautiful sunny morning but the market was pretty dead early on. And even in mid morning when the attendance got better not a lot of produce was selling.

The market had 27 vendors yesterday and only 2 of us, Locust Run and Boulder Belt, were selling vegetables plus Downing's which has cider and apple butter and will soon have fruits and veggies. We also had two meat vendors, 5 people selling plants and 1 selling goat cheese. So we have 11 farmer types selling at this market out of 27, a farming minority at the farmers market. You would think that with so few produce vendors at this market we would both sell out. That did not happen for any of us. All of us took quite a bit of produce home. I did hear the craft people did great sales, though.

I have noticed since last year when several people on the board decided that there should be more crafters at this market (which I hesitate to call a farmers market any longer) the ratio of craft people and bakers to farmers is skewed away from this market being farmer friendly. When I helped to create this market we established a rule that there could be one craft vendor for every 5 (or maybe 7) farmers. We made this rule to ensure that this farmers market would be a FARMER'S market and not be taken over by the arts and crafts crowd. Last year with a new bunch of people on the board that rule was tossed out and "Artist Alley" was created. Now we had a market that had about as many crafters as farmers. Not a good trend in my mind, and I did question this move with several board members and felt like I was blown off by them.

Move forward to 2008 and now we have more crafters than farmers and we also have space issues in the spot where the market is held due to a building going up next door. This has lost us about 7 spaces. So far this season every space has been filled and I know that there are at least 4 farmers who will be coming in later on this season. Will the board tell the crafters there is no space for them (after they have paid their annual fee?) or will the growers be left out? It's gotta go one way or the other (unless the market is moved to larger quarters) because space is very limited.

My issue is that we created a market for farmers to sell their wares when the Oxford Uptown farmers market was born. And now it seems that this market is becoming a weekly craft show. I have read of several markets that went this direction and eventually the farmers were kicked out. I do not want this to happen in Oxford. I do know when you have too many crafters people going to the market start spending their money on the craft items and do not spend their money with the farmers and quickly the situation is a winner for the crafters and a losing one for the farmers. I was hoping this was not going to happen in Oxford but from the looks of things I do not see encouraging things for us growers. Hopefully this will change and what I have been seeing is the strange buying patterns of Oxford's Graduation/Mother's Day weekend and in the coming weeks/months people will be coming to the farmers market to buy food

Eugene and I are lucky because we have a store here on the farm and after 2 years the locals are finding us and shopping here. Sales are up 500% so far this year. The store is not yet supporting itself but it is going in the right direction. As the industrial food system continues to fail I expect we will get a lot more business and in a couple of years will be able to quit going to the Saturday market altogether (man it will be nice not to have to get up at 4:30am in order to get to market by 7am, which we rarely do. We seem to always be late). We plan on sticking with the Tuesday market which, so far, does not have this out of whack farmer to crafter ratio problem. And since I still have a lot of influence with this market, should not for many years to come. I love going to the Tuesday market because it is so laid back and it has a wonderful mix of vendors, all of whom I like a lot. Oh and I don't have to get up at 4:30 am to get there on time.

I just may have to run for the OFMU board this fall, even though we really cannot afford the gasoline to get to Oxford for the meetings. But something has to be done to get the board away from this craft takeover of the farmers market and back in the farmers' corner. Otherwise, we growers may well lose what should be a spectacular market for us.

Rainy Afternoon 69

It's raining today which has messed up my plans to harvest most things today and pack them tomorrow for the Saturday farmers market in Oxford (which has a brand new website Oxford farmers Market dot com) . Sigh, it looks like tomorrow will be a long day. Picking lettuce, spring mix, kale, radishes, arugula, etc., early in the morning. Washing up what we have harvested mid morning than bagging in the afternoon. And opening the store at 11am and waiting on customers who stop by throughout the day. I am trying to avoid pulling 18 hour days on Friday so I have more energy to devote to Saturday.

Washing will take a while as everything will be super dirty and likely full of slugs. I always put a 1/2 cup of table salt in the water as this does two things:
1) Salt water keeps greens very crisp and re-hydrates wilted greens
2) Salt is a slug's mortal enemy and when they hit the salt water they release from whatever they were on, sink to the bottom of the wash tub and die. This is one of our slug controls.
And it means the greens are usually free of slugs when sold (but if you buy our greens, Please wash before use because you never know...)

I have the store open right now but, as usual, rainy days tend to kill farm stand business. Ah, c'est la vie. I would like to take a nice nap but the store is open so I cannot. Instead I sit typing and listening to the rain pour down on the roof occasionally picking ticks off my body and burning them with a lighter (we are still going chem free with the dogs so we get a lot of ticks. I am beginning to question this decision, as the poor dogs are getting scabby where ticks have been removed and seem to be avoiding Eugene and me now that quality petting time means tick picking and killing time).

I have seen Stewie the cat. He is living under the store and for the past week has allowed us to see him and even talk to him before he slinks away. I guess he is realizing he cannot stay angry at us forever and we feed him tasty food (some organic cat food we picked up at the cut rate grocery store B&D Grocery, in Richmond, IN for $6 a 6 pound bag). Yesterday he visited the store but quickly left when I came in carrying a crate of produce. I am happy he did not decide to spray the store.

So I wait till 5 o'clock rolls around to close the store. it is an easy task to close up now that we have a fridge on the sales floor. In the past I would put out things that really needed to stay cold on the unrefrigerated shelves and hope things sold quickly. By the end of the day everything that did not sell would have to be gathered up and put back into the fridge in the back of the building or taken into the house to be eaten ASAP or tossed in the compost. This took up to 20 minutes depending on how much stuff we had (melon season is the worst). Now I just have to shut off some lights, count the cash drawer and remove the money, bring in the "Open" signboard and turn the other open sign around so it says closed. This takes about 3 to 5 minutes.

The one bad thing is only one of the two fridges I bought on eBay works (and I am not too sure how long it will last) and it is already pretty full and we have just started the season. Though soon we will be getting more stuff that does not need to be in a refrigerator like tomatoes, potatoes, onions, garlic, squash (though the zukes and other summer squashes prefer it cold), etc.. I gotta say the fridge has been a huge improvement on many levels. Maybe I will spend my gummint stimulus check on another used fridge as the Commercial fridge repair guy said we should be able to pick one up for around $800. A newer fridge (the eBay fridges are circa 1977) would use a lot less electric and be cheaper to repair.

My First Weekend in May

May has come in like some sort of energetic animal that seems to need so sleep-a shark perhaps. oh that's right that's March that comes in like some sort of animal-lions, sheep, lorises, etc..

But so far may has been one busy and energetic month. May is my favorite month, not just because I was born on May 11th but because it is the best month of spring-everything is in bloom, the trees are pretty much leafed out by mid May, the grass is green for real, the garden kicks into high gear production wise (you should see the lettuce crop-spectacular!) and our markets start up again which means steady income and not living from savings any longer.

This year May started on a Thursday and I spent May Day morning harvesting greens for our markets (our farm store and the Saturday FM in Oxford) and the afternoon dealing with the packaging for the green (I like to have labels on bags and it takes time to print labels, cut the printed labels to size and than adhere them to the bags. Especially when I am using sheets of labels that are not exactly compatible with my new laser printer-if anyone reading this knows what labels work best with a Samsung CLP-300 let me know. It sure ain't the ones I am using currently). Generally I wash the greens ASAP after harvesting but by 10 am Thursday morning we had 25 mph winds and since my "packing shed" consists of a table, a wash tub and a salad spinner and no shelter of any kind around all this stuff I decided it would be better to put the unwashed greens right into the fridge in an unclean state and get out early on Friday morning and get them washed and re-hydrated than.

So after harvesting 5 kinds of heirloom lettuces (Amish Deer Tongue, Cracoviensis, Marvel of 4 Seasons, Red Sails leaf lettuce and Green Oakleaf) arugula, spring mix, baby lettuce and cilantro I opened the store and than went inside to watch the Price is Right (something Eugene and I have done for the past 15 years or so because we can most days because of our work schedule. We love the almost mindless competition, the blatant commercialism and Drew Carey).

Had several customers drop by the store to buy asparagus, spinach, lettuce, seeds, herb plants between 11 am and 5pm. I found after running the numbers that our sales are up 10,000% so far this year over last. of course last year there were a lot of weeks where the store generated less than $20 a week gross income. Which is something we expected because it seems to take people about 3 years to figure out you are here without an expensive and aggressive marketing campaign.

Since we do not have $50K to spend on marketing and a lot of time on our hands we have opted to go cheap with the marketing and allow our on farm business to slowly develop and flower. My web based marketing (website and email list, which you can subscribe to by going to the Boulder Belt website and following the instructions there) has really taken off in the past 4 or 5 months. All I can say to that is, Finally! The Boulder Belt Eco-Farm website is about 13 years old and it has taken a long time for it to get noticed by the right crowd (that would be people in Ohio/Indiana). It also has taken that long for it to evolve into a really nice website that is both useful to me and to you the www public. I also have made a very nice brochure (another bit of work that has been evolving over the past 10+ years). I have a background in art and the person who introduced my to computers, my late friend Ann Bell, was a DTP person who was also a classically trained artist as well as having a lot of experience in printing using movable type. She trained me to use computers for graphics and nothing else. So, to this day I can barely use a spread sheet (and do not keep any records on the computer. That's all done by hand with paper and pen/pencil) but give me a drawing/paint program or word processing app and I am good to go.

Any Hoo, Got through Thursday and Friday came. In the past Friday has always been a bear of a day. Lots of harvesting and cleaning and bagging/bunching to do for the Saturday farmers' market. But I hope, this year, to have my act together to start harvesting Thursday or even Wednesday for the weekend (and I believe if things continue as they have, I will have to do quite of harvesting on Wed. to keep the store stocked) so that Friday becomes a day of light harvest and lots of selling. It sure was nice this past Friday not to have to work 14 hours getting ready for market.

So Friday morning arrived and I got breakfast early and started to work on washing the greens picked the day before. I was hoping to get done before the high winds redeveloped but did not. I was able to get through all the crates of lettuce before the 25mph+ winds kicked and started blowing by baby lettuce and arugula all over the place. Got everything clean, re-hydrated and back in the fridge by 10 am. Harvested asparagus and took lunch. After lunch started in on bagging the greens, bunching radishes and asparagus and waiting on the occasional customer. Wyatt came by for a visit and kept me company as I bagged up stuff (Eugene was mowing). It started storming which pretty much put a kibosh on business for the afternoon. Around 5 pm the rain stopped for a few hours and we decided we needed more asparagus than we had so the 3 of us grabbed knives and piled into the van and took a trip over to the Crubaugh Rd farm and did our annual raid on the asparagus we planted there 5 or 6 years ago. Got just over 5 pounds and noticed that about 1/4 of the row is not producing any longer. We decided this was probably the last time we would go over to get the stuff. The farm looked pretty good. The apple trees there are in amazing bloom and beautiful. Went back home cleaned up and bunched the asparagus than went out to eat at Fiesta Charro in Eaton (our second favorite eatery in Eaton, which has few decent choices. Our favorite place is Adam's Rib but since we had Wyatt, a vegetarian, and Adam's rib is a BBQ shop with no real veg choices we opted for the Mexican place). went back home and to bed before 11pm.

Saturday dawned stormily. We were up by 4am. Did coffee got the last few details finished for the farmers market, ate breakfast, packed the van and got on the road about 1/2 later than we should. Somehow when working with Eugene we both get stuck in some sort of time sucker and can rarely get anywhere on time. But since I am one of those people than tends to be early to things most of the time we are not very late (on our first date he was 4 hours late and I found this was not a fluke. The boy is very time challenged) and more and more often we are on time.

So we leave the farm later than we should in a driving rain storm and hydroplane our way down to Oxford. get to the market and park the van in our spot and the rain stops. Hooray! We do not have to set up in pouring rain. We get set up about 15 minutes after the market has started. But because of the wet weather few people are there to buy so no big deal we are running late. we get set up and we start selling asparagus. By 9 am we are out of the stuff. Val Taylor, the Locavore Queen of SW Ohio (join her list at cincilocavores) had put in an order for all our remaining leeks and arrived for those around 8:30am. It was nice to be done with the leeks after 9 months of harvesting and selling them. They were a wonderful crop but it was time they were sold. By 10 am the market was getting fairly busy, though not as busy as I would have like to see. the Oxford Gourd and Drum Ensemble set up and played for a couple of hours which was fun. The weather got quite windy and peoples shelters started doing bad things and had to be secured (we tie ours to our van). The market extended its' hours of operation this year from 11:30 to noon. It was dead from 11:30 to noon. We did sell a few things as we were packing up but i do not like the new hours. They will likely not be profitable for us and mean we get home a half hour later than in the past. This means things could go wrong on the farm. As an example, this past Saturday because it was storming when we left home we left all the hoop houses and cold frmes closed up. It got sunny around 11:30 or noon but since we had to tarry in Oxford for an additional half hour, plus run to the the Striets to pick up raw milk for ourselves and the Cox's and than drop that milk off at Adam's Rib, The Cox's restaurant, we were worried that when we got home around 1:30pm many things might be roasted to death (fortunately, they were not) in the hot houses.

Ate lunch, took a 45 minute nap got up and went to a Derby day party at Jules' and Rosie's house. because of life we were an hour late to that and forgot to bring salad (and we had a lot of salad greens left over from market-stupid, stupid, stupid) but did get the brisket from Adam's Rib (which I want to develop a religion around, it is that good. By far the best brisket I have ever eaten. Pete Cox is a master at brisket, the ribs are also excellent.) Got to the party got a mint Julep and put in my bets for the race just in time. watched the race and for about 2 minutes were were all jubilant about Big Brown winning in such fashion and the impressive run of the filly Eight Belles with her second place finish. And than just like that Eight belles is dead. Such a tragedy but that's racing luck (know that I spent a lot of my life working with horses both show and race horses and have seen some them die in competition or because of competition. Death happens but 99% of time death does not touch these animals when in their youth and at the top of their game). This event will not be good for American horse racing as there are simply too many sentimental people who will be permanently offended by this.

Got home from the party around 1am, which meant we had been awake for 21 hours (less the 45 minute nap). Went to bed and because I cannot sleep past 6 am no matter how late I go to bed, I got 4 hours of sleep and spent Sunday feeling hung over (and from two not very strong mint Juleps). Harvested asparagus for the store and set up the store for business and spent the early afternoon dealing with customers. but by 3pm I was spent and Eugene took over sales. I am happy to say we had quite a bit of business that day. Not enough to support the farm yet (which is why we still go to the Oxford farmers markets Saturdays and Tuesdays) but things are picking up, a lot, over the past 2 years and it looks like this year the store will be close to self supporting and when the store becomes self supporting we can stop breaking our humps doing farmers markets and stay home.

At 5pm I closed up the store and started making a big salad for dinner that was full of yummy things from the garden while Eugene mowed the grass that is growing at a scary rate. At 8pm we ate and by 9pm I was asleep on the couch, utterly exhausted.

That was our week.

We Got the Fridges!

Wyatt and Eugene moving the second fridge off the second truck. The job is almost done.

Yesterday, after 5 weeks of waiting, we finally picked up our two glass front fridges from Roger Billings in Shelbyville, IN.

Originally we were going to rent a 17' U-haul box truck to get the fridges but that was going to cost something like $275 plus another $150 or so for gasoline. So we nixed that idea and decided we would rent an open trailer for $39.95 from U-haul and use Wyatt's truck to haul the trailer (since he just bought a truck with a nice hitch). We were fine with than plan for several weeks.

Than we could not get a hold of Roger. So we did what anyone who has spent $500 on an eBay auction and than cannot find the seller in order to make arrangements to pick up the items. We freaked out and put a hold on the credit card that was used for the transaction. Than I tried contacting him via eBay (since using his regular email was getting me no where nor were the phone numbers I had) and Voila! That worked. He had not disappeared, he gave me a working phone number and he was expecting us to come by and get the things ASAP. Great. We quickly cancelled the hold on the credit card.

As I mentioned we were planning using Wyatt and his truck to get these things. Wyatt thought he had a line on a free trailer we could use but that fell through so we were back to renting a U-Haul trailer and deciding on a time to do the deed.

Than came an invite to go have dinner at our friend's Jules and rosie (for Rosie's B-day). So over to their house we went and while there started talking about the fridge adventure. Immediatly Rosie wanted to go to Shelbyville. I'm talking about that night.

We did not go to Shelbyville on Sunday night but we did decide we could use Jule's truck and get both fridges in her bed. Got home, looked up the dimensions on the fridges and found they were a bit bigger on the long side than we thought so using Jule's truck was not going to get the job done. We would need to also use Wyatt's truck. So I sent Wyatt an email explaining that we had changed the plans and would be using 2 trucks and no trailer.

Monday morning dawned frigid and cloudy and shortly after 9am Wyatt was at our house ready to go. We were almost ready to go, we were in the middle of feeding the dogs and having a morning smoke. Got done with that and collected up rope, blankets and other things we thought we would need. Wyatt was doubtful that this would work, that there was no place to tie down the fridges, that it would be too hard to get them in and out, etc. basically he regaled us with a bunch of negativety which Eugene chose to ignore while he collected the things we would need for the job.

We drove down to Jules' house. We spent about 20 minutes getting her truck ready to go-it needed oil, air in a tire and gas. Than we were ready to go and started west towards Shelbyville. We had put bad gas in the tank which made the truck run very rough so we stopped in Liberty to fill the tank up and to put some dry gas in the tank. That made the truck run much, much better and we went on our way west on St Rt 44. I had an uneventful trip and some nice conversation with Jules (who is one of my favorite people on the planet). Wyatt and Eugene were behind us.

Got to Shelbyville and found the place with little trouble and after wandering around the place found Roger and soon he was on his fork lift putting fridges on the trucks. By this point Wyatt was pretty convinced that the fridges would not go on the trucks correctly and after they were on he said there was no way to tie them down on his truck so Roger quietly got some new tie downs and tied the fridges down onto Wyatt's truck. So all was ready to go for the trip home.

But Roger was not through with us. He is a concrete person who is in his mid 50's and wants to get out of the business. He makes pavers and statuary and is retiring and selling his building at the end of this month. So this meant he needed to get rid of as much stuff as possible so he gave us a digital scale, several wooden bushel baskets (which we don't really need) some plastic crates that stack and have lids (something we do need), several boxes of tacky objets d'art that Rosie will sell at the 127 yard sale and two rolls of plastic wrap that I have no idea what we will do with. But hey, it was all free. Gotta love free stuff.

With two trucks loaded with fridges and free stuff we set off towards home. We stopped at a Pizza Hut for lunch than headed east.

The trip home was uneventful (thankfully). We drove in the drive way backed Jules' truck up to the store and got busy unloading. Again Wyatt was negative and told us how this would not work. Within 10 minutes we had the first fridge off the truck and in the store. The second fridge on Wyatt's truck was even easier (despite him being even more negative and even more convinced we would not get the fridge off of his truck in one piece) to get off the truck but did get stuck in the doorway for a minute before we finagled it so it would go in the store.

So 30 minutes after we arrived we were done with fridge moving, other than getting them out of the doorway in the store and along the walls where they can be plugged in and used.

Today it is snowing and I am glad we got this done yesterday.